The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

change the world badge

feedspot

Concerned About Unconventional Mental Health Interventions?

Friday, July 22, 2016

Usually I avoid looking at Nancy Thomas’ website, www.attachment.org, but I was reminded of
it the other day and had a look—several looks. And of course, having looked, I
want to point out a few of the flaws therein.

Let’s start by looking at Thomas’ comments about
Attachment Therapy (www.attachment.org/what-is-attachment-therapy/),
which, she says, consists of eye contact, touch, smiles, and the “sharing of
sugar between the mother and child”. Yes, folks, it appears that Thomas is
still committed to the idea she put forward in the 2000 book edited by Terry
Levy (and published, to its shame, by Academic Press). She suggested there that
attachment can be created by hand-feeding caramels to a child. Logical? You
bet, if you can accept Thomas’ premises. These are 1) that attachment normally occurs
soon after birth, 2) that breastfeeding contributes to attachment, 3) that
because human milk is slightly sweeter than cow’s milk, milk sugars play a role
in attachment, 4) that caramels, which contain milk and sugar, are analogous to
human milk, 5) that when a woman hand-feeds caramels to a child, the effect on
the child is like that of being breastfed. Of course, attachment does not begin
shortly after birth, nor is it especially related to breastfeeding. Although it’s
true that human milk is sweeter than cow’s milk, there is no reason to think
that its sweetness has more to do with an emotional effect on the child than
its protein or calcium contents or the individual flavors that come from what
the mother has eaten (and anyway, as I just said, there is no particular
connection between breastfeeding and attachment). In fact, this whole argument
is simply based on sympathetic magic mixed with the assumption that a mother’s
early positive feelings toward her infant are immediately mirrored by similar
feelings on the part of the infant.

Attachment Therapy, as discussed by Thomas, requires,
in addition to sugar, a “release of rage” over a period of several hours. Thomas’
hero Foster Cline supposed that children in this kind of treatment are angry
because of the loss of the birthmother and that their rage blocks the development
of a new attachment. He used a hydraulic analogy to suggest that when the
children express rage, they then become able to form an attachment. This belief
unfortunately contradicts research evidence that expression of anger actually
intensifies the anger rather than diminishing it. In addition, the belief that
a newborn separated from the birthmother will be angry is in contradiction to
everything known about early cognitive and emotional development. On this
topic, of course, we need to ask how the “release of rage” would be brought
about, and the most likely guess is that it is to be done by physical
restraint, shouting, and terrifying the child, as per the rage-reduction
therapy of the ‘90s. Although Thomas does not define Attachment Therapy directly
in this way, she provides enough cues to convey what she is actually talking
about, and allows us to guess what she does in her camps when she takes a child
aside for a “tune-up”.

The same page reveals two other incorrect
assumptions-- unstated, as presumably
the wished-for reader already agrees with them. One is that unwanted behavior
of children is of necessity associated with difficulties of attachment-- difficulties that, we are told, can be fixed
with caramels and other equally likely methods. The second is that the
diagnosis Reactive Attachment Disorder means
that a child is manipulative, aggressive, untruthful, exploitative, and so on.
Neither of these positions is correct. Certainly children who show risky
behavior may have had few opportunities for attachment, but the same kinds of
behavior can appear in children with a good attachment history and clear
attachment behavior in earlier life. Also, certainly there are children who are
manipulative, etc. etc., and they may have at one time also shown symptoms of Reactive
Attachment Disorder (although there is no clear method for diagnosing that
disorder in school-age children), but the various undesirable behaviors named
are not symptoms of Reactive Attachment Disorder.

Thomas also repeats a claim that was common among
members of Cline’s group in Evergreen in years gone by. She proposes that “traditional
therapies” are not only ineffective but actually harmful in cases of
undesirable child behavior. On another page, www.attachment.org/therapy-goals/
, Thomas states that “Non-directive play therapy, traditional talk therapy, and
sand tray therapy have been proven to either be ineffective with children with
RAD or make them sicker.” This is, of course, completely untrue with respect to
any usual use of the term “proven”. In order for such proof to exist, someone
needs to have systematically compared the outcomes of Attachment Therapy with
those of the methods Thomas references, and I can assure you that this has not
been done. Indeed, there has never been a systematic study of the outcomes of
Attachment Therapy alone. Thomas’ argument is not based on the existence of
systematic research, but instead on her belief that if a possible mechanism for
an effect can be named, this is as good as having found evidence that the
effect occurs. She states on both pages the unsupported belief that being alone
with a therapist enables a child to become more manipulative, etc., and thus “sicker”,
and that the presence of the mother is essential to prevent this. These assumptions
are put forward as evidence that the claimed outcomes occur.

It’s a bit mind-boggling to try to unravel the
logical and factual mess presented on www.attachment.org.
Unfortunately for their children, those who can’t bear a bit of mind-boggling
may fall for the claims of this purveyor of snake oil. And just as regrettably
for all of us, reporters who hastily copy Thomas’ claims can and do spread
these misconceptions and give free advertising to Attachment Therapists.

Twenty years ago, the state of Utah opened a can of
worms by hiring trainers for adoption caseworkers from a Colorado group who
advocated Attachment Therapy (AT) in its “rage reduction” form. Caseworkers
were trained to teach adoptive parents that any resistance or disobedience in
the children had to be met with physical force in the form of lying with the
adult’s whole weight on the supine child. In the case of Don. L. Tibbets’ adopted preschool daughter, the child stopped
breathing briefly under this treatment, and although Don reported this to the
caseworker, he was told that he and his wife had to continue the restraint
practice-- on pain of having the
adoption stopped. Don (a registered nurse) did as he was told, but when the
child stopped breathing again, she could not be resuscitated. Don was sentenced
to six years in prison for his role in the death, but as I am sure you can
guess, the caseworkers were not punished.

The Colorado trainers hired by Utah left behind them
the seeds of a number of catastrophes, child deaths, and injuries later caused
by AT. Efforts at legislation prohibiting this type of treatment for children
were successfully fought by “parents’ rights” groups and by AT therapists and
clinics that had sprung up. Nevertheless,
the national furor among professional psychologists and social workers,
culminating in a task force report strongly rejecting AT in the journal Child Maltreatment in 2006, helped to
limit some of the more egregious AT practices in Utah and elsewhere.

But how soon they forget, right? Wyoming has
recently arranged for social services training by the Institute for Attachment
and Child Development of Evergreen, CO, home of at least one practitioner with
AT roots going way back. The IACD website includes a requirement for parents
sending their children to this residential treatment center: if the child has
ever accused an adult of abusive treatment, a document to this effect must be
provided, so that law enforcement and others will know how to respond to claims
a child may make while at IACD. This
precaution must cut out a lot of problems like having to investigate whether a
child was actually abused while at IACD, and may have appealed to Wyoming
social services bureaucrats. As far as can be told from the website and from
reports of personal experiences. IACD does not use any evidence-based
treatments, so other than convenience and shared philosophies, reasons for
choosing IACD training are difficult to find.

Missouri is now spending public money to send
adoptive parents to an ATTACh conference, where they will receive instruction
in a range of beliefs advocated by that organization. Although ATTACh, a parent/professional
organization that taught AT concepts years ago, has apparently retreated from the
belief in physical restraint as an appropriate way to create attachment, nevertheless
the organization continues to teach that behavior problems in foster and
adopted children are largely based on a failure of attachment, resulting in
Reactive Attachment Disorder. Treatment of disruptive behavior, according to
ATTACh, requires “fixing” a child’s attachment to an adult caregiver, even
though the child in question is years beyond the developmental stage which is
the focus of evidence-based therapies that nurture relationships between adults
and children. These views are strongly opposed to positions taken by
conventional psychologists and certainly do not provide the evidentiary basis
that should be required before public funds are expended. Like Wyoming,
Missouri is making a big mistake; people in both states have been conned by AT
proponents.

I want to comment on one other aspect of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch article. In addition
to reporting that parents will be treated to attendance at the ATTACh
conference, the piece refers to a program called Extreme Recruitment, which is
said to aim at adoption within 12 to 20 weeks for difficult-to-place children,
including older and special needs children. Given that it is very hard on
children to be unsure of their position in a family, or even where they will be
sleeping the next day, and that frequent changes of foster care are to be
avoided if at all possible, this rapid path to adoption nevertheless seems to
be an invitation to trouble and disruption. Can either parents or children
rationally know that they want to proceed to adoption after such a short
period? Especially in the case of special needs children, can parents during
that time period learn what they should know about a child’s medical, psychological,
or educational needs? Much as a
caseworker or a parent may want to close a file, they need to consider the
number of cases in which parents say that the child “came home”, all was well,
then suddenly the honeymoon was over and the parents complain that no one gave
them all the information they needed. Hastening to reach adoption decisions
seems like a way to guarantee those kinds of difficulties, with possible dissolution
of adoptions, or in the worst cases the informal Internet “rehoming” that has
had such ill effects for children. When people are convinced that all problems
of fostered or adopted children are attachment problems, and when they believe
that they can “fix” attachment and therefore all the other troubles as well, it
is easy for them to fall for the idea that speedy adoption will have positive
results. Extreme Recruitment is
associated with the Carleen Goddard-Mazur Training Institute, which on its
website offers no evidence of any evaluation of the outcomes of this practice,
although it uses the word “replication” which would suggest to professionals
that some outcome studies have been done--
but in fact seems to mean only that this approach is being tried in
several places. Someone in Missouri needs to examine this program under a strong
light.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Looking at various on line discussions of Reactive
Attachment Disorder, we see multiple claims that every orphaned, mistreated, or
medically fragile child is likely to have RAD (a disorder incorrectly claimed
to cause anger and aggressive behavior). Made-for-TV movies like “Child of Rage”
echo these claims. But… people have not always thought that orphans as a group were
overtly or covertly hostile to other people. This is a fairly recent idea, and
one without real support.

Let’s look at how people used to think about orphans
in the 19th and 20th centuries. Literary depictions of
children give us some information about how people thought, because readers
would not have accepted stories that went against their own beliefs about
orphans.

Should Anne of Green Gables have been diagnosed with
RAD? She was described by L.M. Montgomery as having come from an orphanage to
her adoptive home on Prince Edward Island, so she had experienced the
separation from her birth mother that is supposed to be a major factor in RAD.
She was taken in by people who did not really want her; they had asked to be
sent an orphan, a boy, who would be helpful on their farm and grow up strong to
work for them. Anne’s adoptive mother wanted her to be sent back to the
orphanage and exchanged for the right kind of child, but Anne had winning,
though exasperating, ways (hmm, psychopathic charm maybe?) and the adults
decided to keep her. As she grew up, Anne was a bit impulsive, but affectionate
to her caregivers, and friendly to her teacher and other children. In later
books, she was shown as falling in love and marrying, while maintaining loving
relations with her former caregivers. The author clearly did not think of Anne as emotionally
handicapped or depict her as having more risk-taking behavior than went with
her red hair (an assumption of the time). Orphans were all right as far as L.M.
Montgomery was concerned.

Did Oliver Twist have Reactive Attachment Disorder? Born
to a poverty-stricken mother who soon died in the workhouse, and not knowing
his father, Oliver spent his first years “on the parish” with minimal food or
care. When big enough to be useful, he was sold to an undertaker as an apprentice,
but escaped only to be taken in by the criminal Fagin and forced to learn to
pick pockets by his terrifying mentor. All the elements of abandonment and
mistreatment are here, even Oliver’s presence at a murder. Nevertheless, Oliver
grows up as a kind and engaging person who is willing to give half of his small
inheritance to someone else. Orphans were all right as far as Charles Dickens
was concerned.

How about Dondi, if anyone else remembers him? Dondi
was a comic strip character following World War II. He had a lot of black hair,
pale skin, and huge dark eyes. His ethnicity was far from clear, but he was a
war orphan of some kind, and was adopted by a very rich lady with a lorgnette
and an immense bosom. She was always drawn from a child’s-eye perspective, so
the bosom was much in evidence. Despite his experiences of separation and
trauma, Dondi was not only not angry, but was depicted as wholly good. His reliable
moral compass made him an ethical adviser to Mrs. Van Bosom and her friends.
Orphans were not only all right, but purified by suffering, in the opinion of
the artist.

And then, what about Huey, Louie, and Dewey, or
Ferdie and Mortie? These Disney characters of the Depression, fostered by their
uncles, the cranky and indifferent Donald Duck and the somewhat more socially engaged
Mickey Mouse, were depicted as mischievous, but no more so than non-orphaned children.
Their independence was admired rather than being interpreted as high-risk behavior.

My point here is that beliefs, expectations, and
stories about influences on children change historically and are not
necessarily good guides to decision-making about individual children. When narratives
tell us that orphanhood is a psychologically healthy status, we tend to believe
that, and when we believe it, authors tend to tell us that orphans do very well even under very difficult
circumstances. When narratives like “Child of Rage” tell us that orphans are
not only dangerous but capable of hiding their threat from us, we may believe it,
especially if the stories are repeated. And when we believe, there are many
reasons why more such narratives may be presented to us.

What’s the moral of this discussion? It’s not a good
idea to depend on stories for our understanding of children’s mental health.
Stories are always more interesting when they exaggerate reality, and when they
repeat for us what we already think. They cannot tell us about diagnosis and
treatment of emotional disorders as systematic research can do.

It can be hard for people to resist the appeal of “Child
of Rage” and more recent examples of the type – but just think: would you
expect to learn the real facts about sharks from “Jaws”? About human physiology from “Fantastic Voyage”?
If not, just keep in mind that stories about childhood mental illness were not
written as sources of fact, and we should not try to use them that way.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

In a recent essay in the newsletter of the Society
of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Eric Youngstrom described the “hyper-abundance
of information on the Internet” as including “a wild mix of good information
with opinion, direct-to-consumer marketing, and snake oil sales pitches, all
clamoring for attention”. The latter two commercial approaches are all too
easily absorbed by naïve print reporters, repeated as accurate in print, and
then doubled down back on the Internet as statements of fact. Deception of an
unwary public is multiplied during this process.

A fashionable topic for intentional or unintentional
public deception is Reactive Attachment Disorder. As presented by representatives
of the Snake Oil Manufacturers Educational Association (SOMEAss), this is a
juicy topic, including serial killing just like in the movies, hypersexuality,
and failure to be grateful to one’s mother—all to be treated by a strict
regimen of authoritarian and intrusive parenting. (In reality, RAD is a
diagnosis that describes young children’s difficulty in feeling comfortable
with or staying close to adult caregivers; the term does not describe feelings
or behaviors of school-age children or older individuals.)

Mistaken articles about RAD appear every other day,
but my friend and colleague Linda Rosa has put me onto a beaut out of Oklahoma City:
kfor.com/2016/07/11/camp-for-families-with-children-dealing-with-rare-mental-disorder/.
This article makes mistaken claim after mistaken claim and does not allow for
the public comment that might correct these mistakes.

The piece begins with a remark that alerts all
knowledgeable readers: “Bonding with your baby is one of the most precious moments
in a parent and a child’s life.” What’s wrong here? Don’t I think that happy
moments with a baby are precious? Yes, of course I do. But “bonding” is a term
that describes a parent’s sense of engagement with and commitment to a baby—“falling
in love” with the baby is what we are talking about. The parent’s deep
involvement leads to a cascade of positive events for the baby, but “bonding”
is not in itself part of a child’s life. You have to be grown-up to “bond” in this way. Babies will later develop
attachment to a consistent, sensitive, and responsive caregiver, but this is
not “bonding” and it is not the matter of a moment, precious or otherwise, but
takes months and continues to change form for many years. Parents’ “bonding”,
too, may or may not be a quick process; although some parents feel smitten by
their babies the first time they hold them, many others feel a bit worried that
they don’t “feel more”, but some weeks later will realize that now they are
intensely engaged with the baby. The Oklahoma article is deceptive in its
statement that both parent and baby go through a rapid and permanent emotional
change, and that their feelings about each other are similar. This is not just
a problem of a little detail about child development, because it wrongly suggests
to readers that young children have adult-like feelings that are established at
a very early age-- and would take severe
methods to change later on.

The Oklahoma article goes on to state that Reactive
Attachment Disorder is a rare condition, and that is quite true. So what is
deceptive? It’s the slightly later description of children with RAD as “lacking
a conscience”, being aggressive, lying, stealing, and having fits of rage. None
of these characteristics have anything to do with RAD as the term is
conventionally used. The behaviors listed are in fact far from rare, and are
related to conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorder,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, even autism or early-onset schizophrenia.
These disorders are not associated with attachment issues but are certainly
more common among children who have been mistreated and who end up in foster
care or placed for adoption. The basic cause is the mistreatment, and although
developing good relationships with caregivers may be very helpful to the
children, after early childhood this is no longer an issue of attachment.

One more--
extremely important—point from the Oklahoma article: an interviewee is
quoted as saying that “traditional therapy can have the opposite effects for a
child with Reactive Attachment Disorder.” While the man may not have known and
may have had the best intentions in saying what he did, the fact is that this
statement is a bald-faced lie. Pseudoscientific approaches to childhood mental
and behavioral problems have been making this claim since the early 1990s, when
Foster Cline appears to have been an early adopter of this mistaken view. His protégée
Nancy Thomas (of whom I will have more to say) has followed up and repeated the
idea frequently. In fact, there are several conventional evidence-based
therapies well-known to be effective in treating children with the problems
mentioned earlier; these include Sheila Eyberg’s Parent-Child Interaction
Therapy and Mary Dozier’s Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up. There has
never been a randomized controlled study of the effects of the therapy proposed
by Cline, Thomas, etc. , much less a study comparing their treatment with
conventional methods.

The Oklahoma article proposes a “RAD camp” to treat
the problems they have defined (incorrectly) as Reactive Attachment Disorder.
Click on the “learn more” link and what do we see? Yes, it is a Nancy Thomas camp,
which will, by the way, cost $895 for each family member over 3 years old, an
expenditure of almost $3000 for a couple with one child, and not, I can almost
assure you, covered in any part by health insurance. This woman, a former dog
trainer, has re-issued herself as a Therapeutic Parenting Specialist (UClc, for
impressiveness, but unassociated with any actual certification or licensure).
The Oklahoma reporter has been most cooperative in providing free advertising
for Thomas as part of what Youngstrom called the “wild mix” including “snake
oil sales pitches” and what I call deception of the public.

What actually happens at these camps is not clear,
so I will refrain from suggesting that it includes the holding therapy known to
have caused child deaths and injuries. In other material about the camps, however,
Thomas has said that she takes recalcitrant children away for “tune-ups”, and I
think we can make some educated guesses about what she does.

We can hardly expect
Thomas and her ilk to become more straightforward, but we can demand that
journalists consider their sources. Deception of the public should not be their
goal, however much such deception may benefit snake oil merchants and thus help
a reporter's career.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

I received the
following query, but somehow it did not get published here on childmyths, so I
am posting and answering it here. This message brings up a topic that I’ve been
meaning to mention, as well as some other issues.

GOOD EVENING Madam

I love to
read your posts in your blog.Thos e are really helpful.I am a mum of 5 week's
child.He hardly gazes at me while breastfeeding or while craddling.I am worried
unless that he is a very active child and doctor told me.he is doing
well.So.please tell me.the milestons in the following months.It will be so
grateful if you lwt me know..Thank you in advance..Send from
my vivo smart phone________________________________________

Thanks for
your question! These points you mention are concerns for many young parents who
expect to spend a lot of time in mutual gaze with their baby. But in fact young
babies (in the first few months) do not gaze at people for very long at a time.
They are interested in faces, but they don’t look for a long period of time,
the way we look at them. They also have trouble looking at things that are not
brightly lit, so if you are cradling the baby and your face is in shadow, the
baby may not be able to see you as well as you can see him.

Breastfeeding is an especially difficult situation with
respect to a young baby’s ability to look at a person. For one thing, young
babies are ravenous when they are hungry, and they are interested in nothing
but getting that milk. They usually close their eyes tightly and their faces
turn red with the effort of sucking, then they fall asleep when full, or let go
of the nipple only to be changed to the other breast. For a second thing, breastfed babies
take the nipple right into the center of their mouths, and this means that they
turn the face toward the breast and cannot see much other than the breast even
if they open their eyes. A bottle-fed baby (a little older) may turn to look
and keep the artificial nipple in the corner of the mouth, but a breastfed baby
cannot suck if he does that, just because of the way the mother’s nipple works.

A breastfed baby of 7 or 8 months may let go of the
nipple to look up at the mother, or may just hold the nipple loosely in his
mouth while looking around, then may go back to sucking. He may also put his
hand up to explore his mother’s face and put a finger in her mouth or
(sometimes painfully!) up her nose. Mother and baby may look at each other at
those times, but don’t forget, nursing mothers may be doing other things at the
same time as breastfeeding—drinking a cup of tea, talking on the phone, or
reading to an older child. Breastfeeding is a lovely experience, but it is not
always the exclusive focus of the mother and baby.

There are a lot of developmental milestones ahead of
you, and you can look these up easily if you have Internet access. I just want
to point out to you a developmental step that is coming along soon. At about
two months of age, most babies become much more easily interested in other
people and the world in general. This change has been called the “two-months
shift”. Before it happens, it is quite hard to get a baby’s attention.
Occasionally the baby may look at you and even smile, but at other times he or
she seems to look everywhere else. The baby smiles “at the angels” sometimes,
at you other times, and sometimes not at all, even when you do all the baby-pleasing
tricks like opening your mouth and eyes very wide. Years ago, before the
diagnosis of autism was created, people used to call this a period of normal
developmental autism; the baby was focused almost completely on herself or
himself, which is what “autism”means.

Please keep in mind that like other developmental
milestones, the two-months shift does not occur on a specific day of life, but
just somewhere around the age of two months. For some babies, the change is
abrupt and noticeable. For others, it is gradual and may not appear in the same
way from one day to the next. However, generally speaking, from around the age
of two months you will see that the baby looks at you more, smiles at you more,
is more likely to get quiet and listen to your footsteps approaching, and so
on. You will get much more of a feeling of successful communication about
things other than feeding. Just like an adult, though, the baby will not always
look at or listen to you or smile when you smile—but these things will happen
often enough that you will feel your relationship developing.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Michael and Ian are both 12 years old. Their
birthdays are only a day apart. They are in the same class in school and play
on the same soccer team. Both are reluctant to show any interest in girls or
romance. Neither has begun a rapid growth spurt and both are still sopranos.
Their parents and teachers think of them as a lot alike.

But… let’s go back about 12 years. Michael was born
on just the day he was predicted for, about 40 weeks from the first day of his
mother’s last menstrual period before she became pregnant (depending on the
mother’s cycle, this puts the birth about 38 weeks after conception). Ian,
however, was born about 35 weeks after the first day of his mother’s last
menstrual period (about 33 weeks after conception). Michael was a
full term (or just “term” baby), while Ian was what most people call
“premature”, a preterm baby. They were quite a lot different at that time, because
they were at different gestational ages—40
weeks for Michael and 35 weeks for Ian..

The most obvious difference between them was their
length and weight at the time of birth. At 7 pounds 15 ounces, Michael was
similar to many babies at 40 weeks of
gestational age. He was average in weight for his gestational age. Ian was also
average for his gestational age of 35 weeks, but because he had not been
developing as long, that average weight was not as great as Michael’s. The average weight at 35 weeks
gestational age is only about 5 and ½ pounds, and Ian weighed 5 pounds 7
ounces. Michael was at the average age for birth, counting from his conception,
and he was similar in weight to most babies born at that gestational age. Ian,
even though he was much lighter in weight than Michael, was about the same as
most babies born at the same gestational age as himself.

There were some other differences between the newborn
Michael and the newborn Ian. One was that Ian had a good deal more of the
creamy skin coating called vernix; Michael had had time to lose this and just
showed a bit in skin creases. Ian still had a lot of the head hair called
lanugo, but Michael had only a little. When Ian was lying on his back, an
examiner could take the baby’s left hand and pull it to the right quite a way
across his chest and neck. Michael, lying in the same position, would resist
the pull and the arm could not be pulled very far. Again, when they were lying
on their backs, Ian’s foot could be brought up close to his ear, but Michael’s
could not. (There were many other differences, and you can see more about them
at www.ballardscore.com.)

But—very confusingly—Michael and Ian were about the
same chronological age! The same amount of time had passed since they were
born. Ian spent a little extra time in the hospital, but even a while after he
came home in good condition, his father, Sam, was worried. “I looked in the
book,” Sam said. “It says right here that a baby who is two months old can look
at people and even smiles at them sometimes. Our friends’ baby Michael does
that all the time, but Ian is still just looking around a little bit, just like
Michael did a month ago. I don’t know what’s going on. I know they say not to
compare babies, but I just don’t see how two babies almost the same age can be
so different unless something’s wrong somewhere.”

What Sam missed was that even though they were born
only a day apart, the babies Michael and Ian were not really the same age. Two months after their birth, Michael had
been developing for the 38 weeks between his conception and his birth, plus two
months—about 46 weeks. Ian had been developing for the 35 weeks between his
conception and his birth, plus two months—about 41 weeks. This does not seem like a big difference, but
it means that at two months Michael was almost 10% older than Ian, developmentally
speaking. (But of course as time passed the percentage difference became less
and less, and by the time the boys were 12 the percentage difference was a very
tiny one.)

It’s much less confusing to understand preterm
babies if when they are very young we think of them by their corrected age—the gestational age plus
the chronological age. If Sam had done that, he would have realized that when
he compared Ian’s behavior to Michael’s from a month before, he was exactly
right because Ian was developmentally at about the point where Michael had been
a month earlier.

There are risks for preterm babies, and their
development can be affected by their too-early birth. Also, whatever the reason
for the early birth, that reason could also contain risks for the babies. It
would be a mistake to think that all differences between all preterm and term
babies just have to do with corrections for gestational age. But, all other
things being equal, the biggest differences will be present simply because of
gestational age differences, and understanding that fact can save a lot of worry for parents of
young babies.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.